Diogo Evangelista

The elements that compose Nove retratos e uma paisagem (Nine Portraits and a landscape) have no obvious guideline. The images, based on glossy magazine cuttings (fashion, music, cinema, travels, computer games), are placed side by side with images of unknown origin. The appropriation of found images summons the enticing project that is selecting, detaching and exalting specific elements in a certain composition. The image research in Diogo Evangelista’s work is focused on the relation between high and low culture, a dialectic introduced by Pop art, favoring the exchange between elements of the apparently extreme contexts of culture and underculture, of the erudite and the popular. The artist’s proposal restores historical quoting through the materialization of the flat and shiny quality of magazine pictures, just like the dissociation of the figures from their sceneries/contexts results in the loss of meaning of the aura of the portrayed individualities. The technique, oil on paper over wood, also highlights the criticism of the idea of glamour, shallowness or pretence of an unattainable image or life. The display of different elements closes the construction of the narrative: several elements of different scale are placed at precise surroundings, thus creating a proposition. The hybridism of the artist’s language results in the crossing of images of known individualities, situations or figures with images procured from private narratives, creating the space for a new fiction that must be completed by the viewer.